The week of July 20-24 closed in the red. A sharp sell-off in chipmakers and AI-exposed technology names collided with an oil price shock out of the Middle East, leaving Wall Street cautious and dragging LATAM markets along for the ride. Here is what actually moved, and why it matters for your portfolio.
The market has stopped rewarding AI spending for its own sake and started demanding a return on it. Alphabet lifted its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to roughly US$205 billion and reported its first negative free cash flow, even though its cloud business grew 82%. Tesla disappointed. The Nasdaq fell 2.15% on Thursday as investors punished the gap between spending and payoff.
Oil stole the rest of the story. Brent crude briefly pushed above US$100 a barrel - up 6.8% on Thursday - after Houthi attacks on two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea. It cooled back below US$100 on Friday, but the wider US-Iran tension and the risk around the Strait of Hormuz kept pressure on prices.
Expensive oil pushed the US 10-year Treasury yield up to around 4.70%, near its high for the year. That flipped the market conversation from rate cuts to the possibility of hikes, with the Federal Reserve's next decision landing in the coming week. Meanwhile, new US tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on most trading partners took effect, adding fuel to an already jittery market and a strong dollar.
How the scoreboard ended
The pattern is textbook risk-off: equities down, the tech-heavy Nasdaq down hardest, and the two classic hedges - gold and bitcoin - up. When markets get nervous, money tends to rotate out of growth stocks and into assets that are seen as stores of value, though no asset is a guaranteed safe haven.
Winners and losers
The biggest movers were, as usual, small and volatile names rather than the mega-caps. On the way up, snack maker Utz Brands (UTZ) jumped 94.8%, crypto miner Cipher Mining (CIFR) added 31.8%, and steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF) gained 28.7%. On the way down, Columbia Financial (CLBK) fell 53.5%, the leveraged Direxion 2x Tesla ETF (TSLL) dropped 34.9% as Tesla stumbled, and grocery chain Albertsons (ACI) lost 27.4%. Moves this large in a single week are a reminder of why leveraged and single-stock products carry outsized risk.
On the radar: Alphabet
Alphabet was the earnings-season standout even as its stock fell. Revenue hit a record, up 24%, its cloud unit grew 82%, its Gemini assistant reported 950 million users, and it unveiled a new payments protocol for AI agents (AP2, alongside MA and PYPL). The stock still dropped about 7% - spooked by the US$205 billion capex bill, not by the business itself - and pulled Microsoft and Meta down with it, leaving both trading cheaper than before.
That gap - a strong business, a falling share price - is exactly why the price-to-earnings ratio is worth watching. Alphabet traded around 15.9x earnings, below Microsoft (MSFT) at 22.7x and Meta (META) at 21.7x, which tells you how much investors are paying for each dollar of profit. A lower multiple is not automatically a bargain, and a higher one is not automatically expensive; it depends on how fast the profits are expected to grow.
What LATAM investors should watch
Regional exchanges tracked Wall Street and closed mixed under a strong dollar. The Colombian peso was the exception - the firmest emerging-market currency of the week - on pro-market signals from the incoming government. In Chile, a winter storm across the central-north region hit mining operations and put copper on alert, a reminder of how local events feed straight into globally traded commodities.
For a long-term investor, the useful lesson this week is not the day-to-day noise but the case for spreading your bets. A red week in US tech barely dented gold and bitcoin, and it treated LATAM currencies very differently from one another - which is the whole point of diversification and thoughtful asset allocation.
The Fed decision on Wednesday is the one to circle. With the 10-year yield near its yearly high and oil still unsettled, the tone of that meeting will set the mood for the weeks that follow. As always, the sensible move in a red week is not to panic - stick to your plan and your time horizon.
Legal Notice: Education, not advice. Past results do not guarantee future returns. Investing always involves risks.
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